Paul Stenner: The Experience of Time in Pandemics and Beyond: Views from an Open Psychology

Over the last year or so, the whole world has been shocked by a pandemic. The coronavirus has taken millions of lives and the societal responses to it have resulted in dramatic and unprecedented changes to everyday life. The pandemic has not affected everybody equally. Indeed, it's heightened and highlighted many structural inequalities, but it has affected everybody. The International Labour Organization recently estimated that 80% of the world population has been in lockdown. Now for many, the pandemic has introduced the paradoxical feeling of living through momentous change while also experiencing a sense of paralysis. How has time behaved for you during lockdown? Did this year flash by quicker than usual? Or did time slow down? Or was it a bit of both? Do you feel as if the future you've been expecting has somehow disappeared? My name is Paul Stenner, and I'm a professor of social psychology at The Open University. And with Peter Hegarty, I co-direct The Open Psychology Research Centre. My recent work is focused on cultural practices and their psychological relevance. In the context of a pandemic, it's easy to see why things like engaging with stories and the arts or being able to play together might come to be considered as low priorities compared to more pressing matters like basic physical health and maintaining the economy. But my purpose in this talk is to encourage the view that cultural practices are not trivial, but key to coping with life changes. This is because cultural experiences of various kinds share in common the possibility of enriching the present by giving personal and collective meaning to the future. So in the next half hour, I invite you to take some time out to reflect upon time. Now, all experiences take time, but I want to raise the question of whether it's also possible to have an experience of time, to run up against time. I'm inviting you to consider how the experience of the present can be transformed during situations of significant psychosocial transformation. I'll call these liminal experiences. Liminal situations can be destructive to well-being, and this is partly because time can behave strangely and we can lose our sense of where we came from and where we're heading. But I'll show how certain experiences mediated by cultural forms like play, art and ritual can help people to navigate liminal occasions and carefully handled can enrich lives and open up new possibilities. Now, time has been a hot topic in psychology, at least since William James included a chapter on time in his book from 1890s called The Principles of Psychology. For James, time is fundamental to human experiences. One of his many observations was that, quote, a period of time filled with varied and interesting experiences seems short in passing, but long as we look back, and the same vice versa. A tract of time empty of experiences seems long in passing, but in retrospect, short. Now, today there's an ever-growing literature on things like temporal illusions and different types of time perception, and especially on how these are underpinned biologically. In fact, many are rediscovering James's insights about time as integral to every experience. But scientists are not alone in being fascinated by time. It's been a long-standing preoccupation of poets, novelists and other artists. For example, one of my favourite songwriters, the late Townes Van Zandt, has a line in one of his songs that goes, tomorrow's half of all you've got, so treat him good, because when I'm gone, he'll stay. Many have struggled to treat their futures good during the pandemic, and some feel that their futures have even ceased to exist. I saw a woman interviewed on the BBC News recently who said, I can't wait for the new future to start. This is now a quite common way of speaking, but it's an interesting and quite revealing expression. It seems the future that she had previously expected has been snatched away. We might say that her future has become old. It's become a future of the past, a past future. But a new future hasn't started yet. We might say that she still awaits her future future. So here, curiously enough, we have three different futures. A past future, a present future, and a future future. But how is this possible? G.H. Mead, who was one of the founders of social psychology, argued that it's possible because the future always belongs to a present. The novelty of what he calls an emergent event can disrupt the present. If the present changes significantly as a result of being rudely interrupted, then so does its future. But what kind of thing must the present be such that it can be transformed in this way? Well, for Mead, the present is nothing less than the seat of reality. What he means by this is quite simple. Neither the future nor the past exist as an independent reality. The past has happened and gone, and the future has not yet happened. But both exist and are meaningful only in relation to a present or for a present. So when we imagine the future, this imagining is a real activity that is done in the here and now of a present. And likewise, the remembered feeling of a time now past is always a present feeling for the one going through the memory. What happened in the past has irrevocably gone, but it can nevertheless be kept alive in the present as a memory for present purposes. Now, since the past and the future are folded together in the present, time cannot be understood as if it were an instant, but rather as something that comes in durations or what James calls events with a temporal thickness. Like a drop of water, each drop of present experience comes as a complete unity. For example, when I see a shooting star flash across the night sky, I don't see a series of instant presence. All the changes of place that the star goes through are contained in the same drop of experience that is my present. The recent work of neuroscientists like Jason Brown and Remy Lestienne and others suggests that the brain doesn't work by taking a series of instant snapshots of surrounding reality and then stringing them together like a movie to create a sense of movement. Rather, each drop of duration is more like a living composition which creates a coherent whole out of many different ingredients, adjusting itself by filling in gaps here and adding contrasts there. And more, each present duration flows into the next, emerging from its predecessor and giving rise to its successor. So each drop of present experience is the standpoint from which the past and future are integrated and kept alive in the ever-changing here and now that William James called the stream of consciousness. And this ongoing process creates a sense of coherence and predictability. Each present duration expects its future by carrying forward its past. So when you hear me utter these words, you're surprised if I seem not to bring the sentence to its end. I've been trying to describe to you the kind of thing the present is such that it can be disturbed by a liminal experience. The present can be disturbed because it's a complex and fragile mobile construction composed out of a mixture of processes including perception, memory and imagination. And under ordinary circumstances, we take all of this for granted and we don't think much about time. We're just in time. We use time. We don't feel lost in time because the past and the future give us coordinates that allow us to situate ourselves. But even this is a huge simplification. The temporal coordinates that orient us are also social. We're born into a social world in which time has already been organised into daily, seasonal and annual rituals, for example, and mediated by things like calendars, clocks and timetables. And as we grow up, our lives are structured by the temporal patterns of institutions like family, school and place of work. Our personal time coordinates become part of these wider societal time projects. Our biographies become bound up with the structure of social time and indeed historical time. So while it's true that any given present must always belong quite concretely and uniquely to someone, nevertheless, the present of each of us is thoroughly embedded in society. So when I make you a simple promise, for example, I'm binding our futures together by seeing my future as if through your eyes and committing to it. But certain events can disrupt those coordinates and even rupture the familiar continuity of our experience. When these events disrupt the whole of society, as the pandemic has done, there's a danger of losing the collective sense of temporal orientation. When that happens, we don't know what to expect. There can be wild speculations about the future mixed with denials that anything has actually changed. Or there can be fear mixed with boredom, paranoia mixed with blind trust. Time itself, as Hamlet said, can be thrown out of joint. Now, the concept of liminal experience that I use has roots in Van Genip's famous anthropological study of rites of passage. A typical rite of passage is a traditional ceremony during which people undergo a passage from one status to another, for example, from child to adult or from single to married. Van Genip found that rites of passage around the world are made up of a sequence involving three broad types of ritual. Crudely summarized, at the beginning, there are the rites of separation, which help those involved to say goodbye to the status they're leaving behind. Goodbye, childhood. And at the end, there are rites of incorporation, which help them to say hello to what will be their new social world. Hello, adulthood. In between, there are the liminal or transition rites in which participants momentarily exist on the cusp, as it were, between what they once were and what they will be. Such rituals have been at the heart of human culture probably for as long as people have existed. They provide a collective form of symbolism that helps make sense of important life changes like births, deaths, marriages, initiations. These are life changes during which the present present of the actors involved will soon become the past present as it's replaced by a future present. During the liminal phase of rites, the familiar order of things is deliberately broken and the usual social rules are suspended. Participants are often confronted with physical or mental challenges that put them to the test, or their usual ways of thinking about who they are and what the world is are deliberately scrambled. We might say that experiencing ritual liminality is experiencing a present during which time is thrown out of joint because it's temporarily lost the past and future it previously had. But importantly, this experience of the breakdown of order happens under relatively controlled, supervised conditions. Although every experience is real, we might say that ritual experience has an imaginative as-if quality that makes it comparable to the theatre or to children's play or indeed to the arts or to the sports in general. In fact, the example of rites of passage allows us to differentiate two broad types of liminal experience. Devised and spontaneous, or to put it crudely, staged and unstaged. So a movie about the pandemic is not the same as the pandemic. A devised experience is something carefully arranged that we do to ourselves, whilst a spontaneous liminal experience is a transformative event that actually happens to us, perhaps against our wishes. The devised experience has a subjunctive or as-if feel. The spontaneous experience has an indicative or as-is feel. But more than this, the rites of passage also teach us that the value of the as-if experience afforded by rituals, for example, lies in its tight connection to the real as-is changes that happen in people's lives as they grow and develop and love and die. The rituals are shared cultural forms that enable devised experiences which help those involved to manage the real uncertainties at play in life-changing experiences. More than that, they help those involved to find a broader meaning and purpose to existence in those very changes and ruptures which threaten life's meaning. So in many rituals, for example, the small circles of personal time are directly embedded not just in wider circles of collective or social time, but also in the even wider and more speculative circles of mythical and cosmological time. We might encounter, for example, the mysteries of creation myths and of cosmic destinies like heaven and hell, all designed to situate our little lives in a bigger picture which gives them meaning. This devised as-if quality found in ritual is at the same time deeply familiar and very strange. I've noted that it's a feature shared in common by ritual, by storytelling, by theatre, by film, by art, but also by play and by dreams. In each case, it's as if we step out of ordinary time and space and create another world that exists within the wider world but is exempt from its rules, especially the rules of time. For example, a simple nursery rhyme like the following which gives us access to the as-if world of Solomon Grundy. Solomon Grundy, born on Monday, christened on Tuesday, married on Wednesday, took ill on Thursday, grew worse on Friday, died on Saturday, buried on Sunday. That was the end of Solomon Grundy. It might seem obvious, but what's worth reflecting on here is the fact that the child reciting this little rhyme gets an entire life into the present in front of their eyes in about 10 seconds flat, complete with the rites of passage. No other animal is capable of seeing their life and death like this, of creating a cultural form to present it and to symbolize and express what is simultaneously so trivial and so profound. Let me now unpack this relationship between devised and spontaneous liminal experiences using two brief examples from cultural psychology. The first is about children's play and comes from the research of Martina Cabra in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. And the second is about art therapy. Both will soon appear as chapters in a book which is currently being put together by Brady Wagoner and Tania Zitoun based on some of the ideas that I've been presenting in this talk. First, Martina Cabra recorded the play of two young twins, Natalie and Luke. Natalie and Luke are anxious about their future because they're facing an unstaged, spontaneous life transition. They're about to leave kindergarten and start primary school, which is a big and scary step. Now, when something disturbs a child's life, it will often feature in their play. Exactly this happened with Natalie and Luke. They started playing the roles of mum and dad and they enrolled Martina Cabra to play the role of a small child anxious about having to be separated from her parents. Here's a little excerpt from Natalie. Your mum will come later. She comes back tonight, darling. Luke, we're right next door. You will have fun. And mummy comes back tonight, okay? They all then pretend to sleep and then Natalie and Luke take Martina's hand and take her into the next room. Luke, you have to go to school now, okay? Natalie, yes, come. This is your bag. You will have fun. And mummy comes back tonight, okay? Martina, but you come back tonight. Natalie, yes, darling. We come back later. Now we need to go to work. This is a very simple and familiar scene. But look a little deeper into how time is functioning here. First, the spontaneous experience of liminality that prompted the play was itself an anxiety about an unknown future in a big school without mum and dad. Both twins knew the transition to school was coming but it hadn't happened yet. But clearly this looming future future was disturbing enough to unsettle the present future of the twins. Second, in playing the roles of mum and dad, Natalie and Luke are picking out and using words that they have either heard their parents say in the past or imagine they may say in the future. As Martina Cabra observes, in those 30 minutes of play, we lived through three or four months of life. So the play allowed time to be greatly condensed and rendered into a form that is easily manipulable by the players. We might even say that the play works as a kind of time machine that allowed these children to translate the unstaged problems of their own futures into a new staged devised format. This reframing allows the twins to observe their issues as if from a distance. It allows them to work through their time problems in a safe space in which they can imagine alternative visions of a less threatening future and rehearse them. In this way, art and life mutually enrich one another and the dreaded future in life beyond the play becomes a little more manageable thanks to the play. Something similar can happen when engaging with art and I think this is what makes art therapy so useful. Kirsten Roesler and her colleagues in Denmark, for example, have recently studied experiences during a five-day cancer rehabilitation program based on art therapy. Receiving a diagnosis of cancer is an event very likely to disrupt the present and generate anxieties about a suddenly transformed and uncertain future. Without going into detail, I want to show you this image of a tree that was painted by one of the participants and given the title, Faith. Actually, this is an accurate copy that was kindly painted for me by Kirsten Roesler herself. I suggest to you that this tree is a symbol of time or temporality that has been, as it were, liminalized. As you can see, this is an uprooted tree replanted with its roots in the air. Instead of growing in the usual fashion according to linear time, starting from the roots in the ground and growing to the leaves in the sky, a spontaneous liminal experience has uprooted it and reversed the usual course of things. But this symbol of liminalized temporality also expresses something positive, like faith, because the roots of the backwards growing tree now support the life of nesting birds. So much like the play of Natalie and Luke, for this participant, the process of painting this tree unfolded in an unusual space and time temporarily removed from a troubled wider reality. And thanks to this devised liminal occasion, a present that had lost the future that gave it meaning can be approached indirectly and played with in a safe space rich with imagination and creativity. Of course, it might not work in this way for everyone, but in this case, a new and vivid symbolism was created precisely where meaning had been most shallow. So through the birds nesting in the roots, a new and more positive connection with the future is established, and this can be carried forward into what is left of real life. Again, we see the value that devised liminal experiences can bring in the face of spontaneous liminal experiences, and we see how fundamental time is to that value. Let me now sum up. I've discussed the idea of liminal experiences as events in which we run up against time because the present has been rudely interrupted. Spontaneous liminal experiences can happen because the future and the past always belong to a present experience which can be disturbed. When our present is disturbed or thrown out of its equilibrium, we can then find ourselves between worlds, neither what we once were nor what we will soon become. It's when we're experiencing the disturbing liminality of being between worlds in this way that things like art, play, and ritual come to their own and can help us to make a new sense of the meaning of our lives when that meaning has been temporarily disrupted. Now, after bringing it up at the beginning, I've deliberately not said much about the pandemic. I've let it loom in the background just as Natalie and Luke do and do not focus on their troubles while playing, and just as our rehabilitating artist does and does not focus on her cancer while painting. The pandemic and the various societal and personal responses to it have been immensely complicated, but there can be no doubt that it has dramatically changed the shape of the present on a global scale. It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that we are living as if suspended between two worlds. We stand as if at the cusp of a new future, and we can better understand what Hamlet meant when he announced that time is out of joint. Now, there are some who've likened lockdown to pressing a giant pause button as if the world were some obedient machine and as if time were entirely under our control. It isn't, and this is a dangerous fantasy. It's a dream about time that has for too long animated the modern West. It's a dream of dominating nature with technology in a drive for ever-increasing wealth and power. We now surely know that this dream is actually costing us the Earth, and it's also generating ever-growing inequalities. The ruptures in our lives introduced by liminal experiences can easily be exploited by opportunists and tricksters, and when mishandled, they can easily give rise to closed-mindedness, to conflict and hostility. But this is not the only possible future that awaits us. I've suggested that the experiences we can get from art, literature, play, ritual, and many other cultural forms are crucial to human psychology and collective life. We should take these cultural experiences very seriously. Tomorrow is half of all we've got, so let's work out how to treat it good. Thank you very much for listening.